"Music is not made to express sentiments but to express music. It is not a vase where the composer distils his soul, drop by drop, but a labyrinth where one never finishes entering and leaving, to discover new paths, where one never wears out the mystery." – Pierre Boulez at age 40 “Boulez Bouleverse La Musique,” Realites, April 1965.
Many of my students often write compositions that tell a story. The younger ones sometimes want to describe the action of a potential video game; the more experienced seek to express something that plumbs deeper emotions. Among many examples of well-known composers, Richard Strauss wrote massive “tone-poems” that told stories of homelife, Nietzsche’s philosophy, or the pranks of a German folk hero. Stravinsky composed programmatic compositions, but even he confessed, after a detailed description of the images he was alluding to in his Symphony in Three Movements (1945), that “In spite of what I have admitted, the symphony is not programmatic. Composers combine notes. That is all.”
[For more on this read Joseph Horowitz’s blog post titled “Stravinsky, the New York Philharmonic, and Program Music.” https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2010/03/stravinsky_the_new_york_philha.html]
I believe this. Music is about music is about music. But I think it helps creative directions if one has a narrative to follow or express. I am finishing a composition titled “Atmospheric Rivers” for pianist Kathleen Supové to be performed with electronics. Covid-willing there is a premiere slated for March 18, 2022 in Brooklyn.
The composition was inspired by a Nova documentary on how Saharan dust from the Bodele Depression in the Republic of Chad is swept by strong winds onto “atmospheric rivers” that flow over the Atlantic and bring nourishment to the Amazon Rain Forest. The dust supplies phosphates that are not plentiful in the forest. The dust itself comprises the remains of plankton that were deposited into the soil when the Bodele Depression was the bottom of a seabed millions of years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpFryXQbVEA
This story is a fascinating example of interactions in the environment which connect plankton, nourished by undersea rivers from Antarctica, eventually finding their way from Africa to the Amazon, and which then may end up swept back into the sea by the Amazon River, returning to the source of a journey that may take thousands or millions of years.
Will the listeners get this from the music? No, not unless I detail it for them in words. But the story gave me a structural framework from which to create the music. Ultimately, I want the listener to have what I hope will be an interesting listening experience, whether they connect it to a storyline or not.
Boulez was composer concerned with finding new paths through his composition without the aid of programmatic story telling. This is partly evidenced by his series of piano pieces titled “Notations.” That, after all, is what they are, notations representing sounds. Music about music about music . . .
Representational painters have the advantage of depicting story scenes if they wish; novelists, of course, tell a story. Playwrights and films tell stories. Music is an abstract collection of sounds that relies on its own internal logic including harmony, melodic phrasing, relations between intervals, or collections of sonic textures, among others. Opera tells a story, but is contingent on artforms outside of music including visual art for scenery, a libretto for the story, and acting. Music, as much as possible creates an atmosphere for the story.
As Boulez says, music is a never-ending path that, through turns and changes in time and style, and the contributions of generations of creative composers and musicians, always reveals new mysteries.